The ZORA Interview

Amber Ruffin Is Your New Late-Night Goddess

All about setting boundaries, listening to Xscape, and reviving late-night TV

Amber Ruffin. Photo courtesy of Peacock

In celebration of her very own The Amber Ruffin Show, ZORA got to know the funny woman a little better with a few questions about her first celebrity crush, celebrating herself, and, of course, what we can expect from her Black woman late-night takeover.

Thanks to Amber Ruffin, Black funny-girl magic on late-night TV might truly became a thing. Fans of Late Night With Seth Meyers on NBC are no strangers to Ruffin’s culture-infused funny, especially her super-popular “Amber Says What” segment. There, the Omaha, Nebraska, native uses various tones for the word “what” to convey either excitement or disappointment as she riffs on current events from an unapologetically Black and female perspective.

In a recent “Amber Says What” segment, Ruffin, who also wrote for the inaugural season of HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show, called out the X-Men video game Marvel Future Fight for whitewashing Storm. “Before I show you this,” Ruffin said prior to unveiling a picture of Storm resembling Charlize Theron, “you should know that Storm is a Black woman. Like her dad is African American, and her mother is Kenyan princess Black. And if you’re a Black woman…